Breast cancer, prostate cancer, and even routine infections. A new report ties these and other maladies to smoking and says an additional 60,000 to 120,000 deaths each year in the United States are probably due to tobacco ...

Death rates from lung cancer will exceed those for breast cancer for the first time among European women in 2015, according to the latest predictions published in the leading cancer journal Annals of Oncology today.

Taiwan on Tuesday slaughtered nearly 6,000 geese after 14 more farms were confirmed to have been infected in the latest outbreak of avian influenza that has led to the culling of more than 140,000 birds.

At Galway Hospital in Ireland, a new device is used to "predict" cardiac events in people at risk of sudden cardiac death. This technology was developed by a Mexican researcher, and the city's university patented it, looking ...

Doctors joke that if you're going to have a heart attack, the safest place would be at a big national gathering of heart specialists. But a new study suggests some older hospitalized heart patients may fare better when these ...

People are living much longer worldwide than they were two decades ago, as death rates from infectious diseases and cardiovascular disease have fallen, according to a new, first-ever journal publication of country-specific ...

Overweight and obesity in early pregnancy are associated with increased risks of infant mortality, with the greatest risks seen among severely obese mothers, finds a study published in The BMJ this week.

Mortality rate

Mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in some population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 9.5 in a population of 100,000 would mean 950 deaths per year in that entire population. It is distinct from morbidity rate, which refers to the number of individuals in poor health during a given time period (the prevalence rate) or the number who currently have that disease (the incidence rate), scaled to the size of the population.

One distinguishes:

In regard to the success or failure of medical treatment or procedures, one would also distinguish:

Note that the crude death rate as defined above and applied to a whole population can give a misleading impression. The crude death rate depends on the age (and gender) specific mortality rates and the age (and gender) distribution of the population. The number of deaths per 1000 people can be higher for developed nations than in less-developed countries, despite life expectancy being higher in developed countries due to standards of health being better. This happens because developed countries typically have a completely different population age distribution, with a much higher proportion of older people, due to both lower recent birth rates and lower mortality rates. A more complete picture of mortality is given by a life table which shows the mortality rate separately for each age. A life table is necessary to give a good estimate of life expectancy.